The archives used to be done this way a while ago over at Grey Expectations, but the calendar-style archives went away with the redesign.

I wonder how I would go about doing that for a moblog using MovableType... (?)

I've had the archives for my wife's photo site done in a similar way for awhile: January 2004 Archive of Indirect Sunlight.

It's powered by Movable Type. If you want details on the "how", email me.

I've been doing the same sort of thing for part of my photoblog's archives. My friend uses a much nicer calendar display for his sites index. I think this a very common means of displaying archives for photoblogs in fact. The first site I saw this done at was brownglasses.org.

But to answer your question, no I haven't really soon another cool way to present photos. There's only so much you can do with a set of thumbnails that is functional.

You can do it in MT with MTEmbedImage and some template hacking. Here's my ten years archive so far.

If you want details on the "how", email me.

Even better, post your solution somewhere so more people can see it.

I've used a similar archive display for the 4 years of my Daily Digital photos. It's powered by vim.

I think Sara Flemming @ soubriquet.net uses MT in her similar setup as well.

my archives are kind of an abstracted, upside-down, color-coded calendar.

I first saw that at xaiohai, and although the rest of the site was uncompelling, it was pretty cool. Might be an interesting plugin for Textpattern

My Casio EX-S3 has a calendar view which displays the thumbnail of the first photo from each day. Overall it's a great little card-sized camera.

I set up a Flickr account, and quickly realized that they automatically downsize your photo
to a very small byte size. The quality of the image obviously downgraded below what you
get with an Imageshack upload, with their minimum upload of 850 kb.

If there's a way around that, please let me know.

Flickr makes 4 or 5 different sizes of each image (depending on the size of the original) and keeps the original around for future use. When look at the web page of a particular photo (e.g.), the button on the left labelled 'all sizes' will show these to you (only pro users have access to the originals).